Posted by As I wrote in Part One, Julio Velasco recently made a presentation at the USA Volleyball High Performance Coaches Clinic. Blog reader David Cordes attended the presentation and kindly made his notes available. Here are the notes for the second part of Velasco’s presentation. Again they are presented as taken, without commentary.
– Coaching is an art , not a science – Doug Beal
– You can have your own art, your own style, but you can’t build a building that will fall down.
– Coaching is an Art like Architecture.
– Coaches build relationships with players and with other coaches the way architects build buildings.
– The way we coach can become an ideology. We like people who think like we do. So we tend to only communicate with and listen to others like ourselves.
– To be a good coach we must know how to convince players – how to play, how to practice, how to do skills.
– It is not important what the coach wants or likes, he has to convince his players.
– I use what is useful for my team. I know what is useful because I study volleyball from different cultures and ways.
– In Italy – you can build a perfect building but can’t build a perfect block?
– Hypothesis – maybe we lose because we play bad! We can change that. We don’t have to change our culture, or history. We just have to change how we play.
– We have to find solutions to our problems. Solutions that work for us. Situation: the set is low and tight to the net – do you like it? So how do we deal with that?
– For coaches we must find solutions to any situation just like we ask our players to do.
David also made the following general notes from the presentation…
– The coaches job to identify problems your team is having and find solutions for that problem and then convince your players to adopt that solution. You can’t just preach your ideology. You have to find out what works for your team and convince them to follow that teaching.
– The hard part for coaches is properly identifying the problem and then finding the right solution for it.
– The artful part of coaching is using your knowledge of volleyball to build relationships with your players and other coaches.
In addition, John Forman from the Coaching Volleyball blog was also in attendance and wrote a great post on part of the presentation that you can read here.
Today’s videos are from the first great Italian victory of the Velasco Era, the 1989 European Championships.
At Home On The Court 